Need faster internet speeds at school? 9 Cal State University campuses to upgrade connection from 10 gigabytes to 100 gigabytes

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Steve La director of network telecommunications & security information technology services at CSULB shows the completed upgrade of internet connection on campus in Long Beach on Thursday, June 14, 2018. Nine Cal State campuses  including Long Beach, San Bernardino, Pomona, Fullerton and Northridge  are upgrading their Internet connections from 10 gigabytes to 100 gigabytes. The upgrade will not only help students on social media, it will also assist in faculty research and help move more campus documents into the cloud  the digital version of a file cabinet.
(Photo by Brittany Murray, Press Telegram/SCNG)

Come the fall of 2018, Cal State students at nine campuses — including Long Beach, San Bernardino, Pomona, Fullerton and Northridge — will no longer need to slog through a slow internet connection.

In a move that will save the Cal State system money in the long run, the campuses will upgrade their 10 gigabyte-a-second connection to a 100 gigabyte-a-second internet connection. The upgrade in Long Beach and San Diego are already done.

The need for the bandwidth is long overdue, said Michel Davidoff, chief infrastructure officer of the California State University Chancellor’s Office in Long Beach. Across all 23 campuses the amount of bandwidth used has grown 30 percent year over year, he added.

“Much of what students do is now over a wireless internet connection,” Davidoff said.

To put that speed in perspective, consider this: Netflix recommends a speed of 5 megabytes a second to stream HD video. The new speed will allow for 20,000 streaming HD videos at the same time.

The upgrade will not only help students on social media, it will also assist in classroom needs and faculty research, Davidoff said, nothing that some campuses are downloading massive amounts of information from the moon or for space exploration.

In San Bernardino, faster internet speeds mean help with virtual reality projects. In Long Beach, it means more quickly sharing information about sharks.

Classrooms will benefit, as well.

From research to quizzes to online classes, “today’s classrooms incorporate and rely on the internet more than ever before,” said Ranjit Philip, senior director of infrastructure services at Cal State Northridge.

The upgrade will also help move more campus documents into the cloud — the digital version of a file cabinet, said Sam Sudhakar, vice president and chief information officer at Cal State San Bernardino. Sudhakar notes that a new housing complex is set to open in the fall.

Finally, students can more quickly review and manage their student accounts and course registration, said Min Yao, chief information officer at Cal State Long Beach.

The speed upgrade will cost the Cal State system a one-time cost of between $1.7 million and $1.9 million,Davidoff said. In the long run, he says, the project will save $270,000 a year.

He explains it this way: Instead of leasing internet service on a month-to-month basis, the Cal State system will instead lease the fiber optic wire for the next 20 years.

Davidoff figures it’s best to upgrade the system now to be ready for the next new technology.

“You don’t want to wait six to eight months so you can increase your capacity,” he said.

Michael Watanabe has been a journalist since graduating from Cal State Long Beach in 2003. When he's not writing or editing stories, you'll catch him re-watching Joss Whedon's cult sci-fi western "Firefly" or reveling in DC's Arrowverse.